That isn’t fitting the data to the theory, that is the theory making incredibly accurate predictions. The data matches the theory and that is extremely strong evidence that the theory is correct. there are numerous predictions that evolution has made. Consider that Darwin lived long before the discovery of DNA and yet I’m recent decades all of the data we’ve learned from studying DNA has confirmed evolution - such as Chromosome 2. If humans didn’t share common ancestry with other apes, then God would have to created humans and apes with the express purpose of tricking biologists into believing that they share ancestry once humans learned about DNA.
As for what could falsify evolution, that is a big question because it’s a big theory. There are thousands of bits of evidence that support evolution, some essentially prove evolution. I think that much of this evidence would have to be shown to be false before I could be convinced that evolution is false. If, for example, the fusion of Chromosome were shown to be a conspiracy of scientists faking it, that wouldn’t disprove evolution, but it would be a major bug of evidence gone.
If a man were on trial for murder and there were numerous eye witnesses, DNA evidence, a murder weapon with fingerprints, security camera footage, power residue and his hands, and a confession - what would it take to reasonable convince you of that man’s innocence? It would require showing that all of that evidence was fake or wrong in some way.
So it is with evolution. It’s been proven true with mountains of evidence. To convince me that evolution did not occur, that evidence would have to be proven wrong first, which seems extremely unlikely.
Also, unrelated to the truth or falsehood of evolution - the most popular alternative theory for life involves the claim that day and night existed before the Sun and that two of every species of animal could fit into one boat while Mount Everest was submerged by water. To say that evolution is the best game in town is an understatement.
This approach is so far from scientific rigor, it's fit to make a researcher cry.
The standard of proof for whether or not a thing is true, is not 'the preponderance of evidence,' (not that Evolution has passed that). It is 'is this reproducible?' and 'has it been falsified?' Did you know that some people claim that there's been mathematics done proving that a bumblebee can't fly? It doesn't matter what they claim about wing area to mass, volume, or anything else, what matters is that the bumblebee can be observed to fly.
Proper scientific rigor and skepticism starts from the position of 'I do not know whether or not this is true. Let us investigate the data, and see what that demonstrates.' There's two types tests you can then formulate.
The first type is 'my theory predicts if X is true, then in Y circumstances, we will find Z.' This is useful for gathering supporting evidence, but it only gets you so far, because it is also possible for
other theories to make the same kind of prediction, but based upon a different mechanism.
The second type is 'If my theory is correct, then if X is true in Y circumstances, then Y
cannot happen.' This is testing for
falsification.
As an example of this, it used to be believed that 'living things were made of a fundamentally different substance than non-living things. It was thought that maggots spontaneously generated in a corpse, because a living thing turned into another living thing. A scientist who did not believe this (I cannot think of his name right now) contested this, believing that maggots were spawned from living flies, and conducted a test where a lump of meat from a fresh corpse was sealed inside of an airtight container (I believe with a transparent top).
If maggots had formed, his own hypothesis that maggots did not spontaneously form, but required the presence of adult flies to be created, would have been falsified. Instead, the idea that they'd spontaneously form was falsified. It wouldn't have mattered how many other supporting pieces of evidence he had for his theory; if maggots had formed on the isolated piece of dead flesh, his theory would have been disproven. Repeat testing to make sure that the sample hadn't been corrupted, there wasn't some other interfering factor, etc, would be appropriate, but if it kept giving the same result, theory disproven.
One of the big problems with evolution, is that evolutionists
will not allow the second form of testing to be applied. Their response to the crisis that Irreducible Complexity imposes on Evolution, was to turn Michael Behe into a social pariah for publishing Darwin's Black Box about the issue; the man wasn't even a Christian arguing for Biblical creation, or any other religion's form of it, he just had a scientific criticism.
The same treatment has been applied to those who raise issues about the statistical impossibility of Abiogenesis; hand-waving of 'you just don't understand the amount of time involved,' etc, etc, instead of doing some basic number crunching to show some degree of plausibility.
Of course, the thing is, the evidence for/against evolution position is actually even worse than that, because the evolutionists have a tendency to
not talk about how things they once predicted would support evolution,
didn't.
The first example of this would be the fossil record. It was originally
predicted to show long, gradual species changes, but of course it didn't. Instead evolutionists have come up with justifications for why it doesn't.
Another example, as Bear Ribs has mentioned already, work with
Fruit Flies in the Face of Macroevolution designed to accelerate mutation and thus evolution as much as possible have failed to change it into a different creature. Given fruit flies can reach adulthood in 10-12 days, you can get thirty generations in a year in a single line in a test study. All you get out of such research is defective fruit flies, or the same fruit flies. Notably, studies with fruit flies have been being undertaken since
1910.
Similarly with Bacteria, there has yet to be a bacteria that evolves into a different bacteria, even though they can reproduce in as little as
thirty minutes. Yet no testing done has yet to create a new species of Bacteria, or even come close.
As I've mentioned before, there was Embryology, concocted by Ernst Haeckel and proven fraudulent in the 1860's, yet still held up as 'proof' a hundred years later to people who didn't know about the fraud.
Piltdown man, where evolutionist Charles Dawson took bits of a human and an orangutan, the skull and jaw in aprticular, did some work with a file, put them together, and presented it as 'proof.' The thing had been bloody
painted and chemically treated to make it look like a 'missing link.' It took
forty years for this to be recognized as a forgery, which tells you something about how hard evolutionists were testing proof that 'supported' their theory.
Java Man, where a skullcap and a bit of a jaw that were from an ape were found within 40 feet of a human thigh, and then presented as a 'proof' of evolution. Eugene Dubois, the man who found it, failed to mention the two human skullcaps also found nearby for twenty years, and a later expedition sent to investigate the sight found the strata it all had been dug out of had what are considered modern life forms.
There have been millions of man-hours sunk into research to 'prove' evolution, and billions if not trillions of dollars, all of which could have been spent doing more useful things like researching cures for cancer, hepatitis, HIV, or other deadly diseases. Instead it has been
wasted on something that provides no practical benefit to living humans.
Critical proof of evolution that has
never been provided:
1. An intact chain of fossils showing one species involving into another. Evolutionists now commonly claim it is literally impossible for such a chain to exist, making the claim non-falsifiable.
2. Laboratory work demonstrating anything even
approaching species turning into another species. Evolutionists now commonly claim that it is not
possible to get this within a timeframe less than millions of years, again making the claim non-falsifiable.
3. A plausible mechanism for Abiogenesis. There is literally not even a plausible
speculation as yet for how life could have arisen from inanimate matter. There's plenty of speculation in general, but nothing that has even a shred of actual evidentiary support.
Meanwhile, in the 'reasons that evolution is almost certainly
not true' category we have:
1. Irreducible Complexity. The standard evolutionist hand-wave is, again, 'lots and lots of time,' while also dismissing how you both need more time than the universe is speculated to exist for, and how incomplete non-viable systems surviving in a species over thousands of generations
directly contravenes natural selection.
2. The fact that every complex mechanism we observe in reality
other than life has an Intelligent Designer behind it.
3. The number of times the fossil record 'suddenly and abruptly' shows a whole ton of life forms that aren't in deeper layers,
instead of the long, slow, gradual emergence of species that evolution as a theory of origins predicts.
The
only supporting 'proof' I have
ever seen for evolution has
always been things that are not just equally easily explained by the Intelligent Design hypothesis, but are in fact
more easily explained by the Intelligent Design hypothesis. I have been tracking this debate for
twenty years, and the closest I've seen to new 'evidence' in support of evolution emerge is 'this bacteria can now partially digest something it couldn't digest before.'
Whereas the increased understanding of how complex protein synthesis and epigenetics has made the amount of complexity evolution has to account for increase by
entire additional orders of magnitude.
'More time' is not an incantation for some magic spell that absolves the need to present evidence. 'Even more time' doesn't do it either, especially for those of us who know that the atheists were regularly upping the estimated age of Earth and the universe through the 20th century as they were confronted again and again by how ridiculous their claims were.
I'll close this post out by dropping some quotes:
From
Evolutionary Biologists (kind of the opposite of young earth creationists) Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in 2002:
“Speciation, whether in the remote Galápagos, in the laboratory cages of the drosophilosophers, or in the crowded sediments of the paleontologists, still has never been directly traced.”
From David Berlinski, Agnostic (or at least he was at the time of the quote) on the culture and attitude among 'scientific' atheists:
“Has anyone provided proof of God’s inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on.”
From Bacteriologist Alan Linton:
"But where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms. "
